Another Loss, Another Dear Friend Gone

Six weeks ago, Herman and I lost one of our dearest friends, Steve, to cancer. From the time he went into the hospital to the time he passed was only three weeks. We thought that was the end to that tragedy, but we were dead wrong.

We found out today that Steve’s surviving spouse, who is also a dear friend, Lee, has committed suicide. Herman and I are both gut-shot. We had talked to Lee over the phone several times, and were planning to drive up to San Francisco in two weeks to help Lee get his affairs and paperwork in order.

I can’t help thinking that if we’d gotten up there sooner, this might not have happened. I can’t remember a time when I’ve felt so empty.

Gratitude

I started the day like I start every day: while still in bed, staring out the window to appreciate the sunrise, I felt grateful that I’m allowed to live yet another day.

I began this habit about three months ago, opening the day with a little prayer of thanks. I’m not acknowledging God or the Buddha or Allah. It’s simply expressing that warm feeling of gratitude I feel in my heart. In my old age, I’ve come to appreciate that life is so precious that I can’t waste even a second of it. And what time I do have I must live fully, and with great joy.

I choose to celebrate this day, this hour, this time I have now. I celebrate living. 

Living a life steeped in gratitude, for me, is enormously uplifting. It makes me focus on what blessing I have gathered, rather than agitating on what I don’t have. I have a loving husband, good friends, comfortable home, my writing, and excellent health. I consider myself a wealthy man, and I’m utterly grateful.

Happiness

I believe that all humans seek happiness, and I’ve come to think that attaining happiness is our purpose in life. Whether an individual is religious or not (and it makes no difference which religion one follows) we all strive to make our lives better, which means some sort of movement towards attaining what we imagine to be happiness.

Yet, achieving true happiness in today’s society has become, more and more, ill defined, elusive, and ungraspable. For many, those moments of occasional joy that life brings are fleeting, and bouts of happiness feels like something that comes out of the blue, and disappears just as quickly.

Yet, I believe true happiness comes from understanding one’s needs, and training one’s mind to develop and sustain happiness. It takes inner discipline. It takes knowing yourself. It takes a willingness to change your habits.

I believe this because this is how I created a life full of happiness for myself, after decades of striving to achieve it. For me that first meant meeting several basic needs: a quiet home environment where I could write, a loving partner, caring friends, basic food and material needs. But I needed more to be truly happy. And that more, I eventually learned, was a willingness to reach out to others, to create a feeling of affinity and goodwill, even in the briefest of encounter. 

The Dalai Lama once said, “My religion is kindness.” That simple statement had a profound effect on me. It seemed more compassionate than the old “Do Unto Others” I’d always tried to follow. After much thought, I made that my religion as well. Every hour of the day, I strive to show kindness to all living creatures.

It sounds simple, yet it was extremely difficult for me. And I’m still striving to make it a way of living. What is hard is crushing my ego so that I put others needs before mine, even people who rub me the wrong way. But with inner discipline, it can be realized.

I no longer compete with my fellow men and women. I put their needs above my own. Even when people are rude or insulting, I try to absorb those negative feeling and respond with kindness. When I hear political discussions where people are insulting one politician or another, I refuse to participate. Not that I don’t have my opinions on politics, I simply refuse to be rude to anybody. 

And what I’ve found over the last few years, is this attitude of kindness is the key ingredient for making my life happy. Call it karma. Call it anything you want. Being kind to others makes me feel good. It brings happiness to my fellow humans, and it brings a double measure of happiness back to me.

DSP Publications Will Publish My Latest Novel

I am overjoyed to announce that I have signed a contract with DSP Publications to publish my latest novel, Everything You Ever Wanted. The projected release date is June/July 2018.

DSP Publications is a boutique imprint producing quality fiction that pushes the envelope to present immersive, unique, and unforgettable reading experiences. They choose stories that depart from mainstream concepts to create fantastic and compelling journeys of the mind. Their books reach into a wide range of genres, including fantasy, historical, horror, mystery, paranormal, science fiction, and spiritual fiction. Please visit them at http://www.dsppublications.com.

My manuscript it is entitled:

Everything You Ever Wanted

Or

Surviving Immortality

It’s the story of a man who discovers the fountain of youth, a formula that will make old people decades younger, and keep people youthful and healthy for several thousand years. But he tells the world he will not divulge his formula until every gun, tank, battleship and bomb has been destroyed. When the world is free of all weapons, then everyone will live forever in peace. And then he goes into hiding.

Before he disappears, his gay son (the protagonist) is exposed to the formula, and becomes immortal. The father (the antagonist) takes his son into hiding with him, but then the son discovers his father has unleashed a sinister plot on the human population.

It’s a story that pits man’s greed against his lust for violence. It’s a tale of a world gone crazy, driven to the brink of destruction by the promise of immortality, and the account of one gay man who realizes the courage, the will, and the compassion to combat the insanity, both within himself and outwardly.

Everything You Ever Wanted is also a tale of family bonding, betrayal and penitence. It envelops all that is unique to futurist stories: the bleak prospect of a society in chaos, the isolation, the camaraderie of men and women fighting to save the human race. Yet, it stands alone in two important ways. First, it is a dignified portrait of two lovers who develop a sexual relationship while struggling to survive a madman out to destroy them. More importantly, however, it describes the heart-wrenching measures that a young gay man will suffer to atone for his father’s betrayal.

A Writer’s Focus

Normally, good writers are not eclectic. Each focuses his/her oeuvre on a single idea, a subject that ignites his/her passion, a theme he/she chases with beautiful variation through a lifetime of work.

For example, Hemingway was captivated with the idea of how to face death. After he witnessed his father’s suicide, it became his central premise, in writing and in life. He examined death in war, in sport, on safari, until he finally took his own life.

Charles Dickens, whose father was imprisoned for debt, wrote of the lonely child searching for the lost father in almost all his great works: David Copperfield, Oliver Twist, and Great Expectations.

Not that I’m in the same league as Hemingway and Dickens, but I also have a central theme that keeps popping up over and over—a gay protagonist who gets crushed by an unkind world, who picks himself up, and crawls through hell in order to pursue his dream, and ends up finding something even more treasured than he first imagined. 

Looking back on my history, I can pinpoint where this theme came from. When I was just coming into manhood, my father had a cancer operation that left him bedridden and weak as a newborn. His doctors told him he had only months to live. He fought back, day by day, recovering his strength an iota at a time. He beat the cancer, and eventually returned to work. He lived for another sixteen years. Because of his illness, he was forced to give up drinking. He attended AA, and became a supporter of the Twelve Step Method. His last several years he spent mentoring recovering alcoholics, which brought him enormous gratification. He lost everything, fought back, which led to a new calling, and that eventually led to a meaningful life. His battle has been my inspiration all these years.

Like so many other writers, I have found a subject and it sustains me over the long journey of the writer.

Genre should be a constant source of reinspiration. Every time I reread my manuscript, I get excited about it, because it is my kind of story, drawn from the thing in my past that most inspires me.

Book Reivew: What Belongs To You by Garth Greenwell

Reviewer: Alan Chin

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

★★★★★

A middle aged American teaching history in Bulgaria hooks up with a young hustler, Mitko, in a public restroom, and he pays Mitko for sex. The teacher finds himself drawn again and again to Mitko over the following months, until he is ensnared in a relationship where lust leads to pain and resentment, feelings are one-sided, and each new tenderness comes with a higher price.

What Belongs to You is an exquisite debut novel of middle-aged desire and its consequences. About reaching for something that you can never really possess. It is a story about how our needs, our scars, and our shame shape who we love, but more importantly, who we are.

At first, this novel seemed like a cliché setup I’d read many, many times. And indeed the plot is well-worn.  However, the prose has such lyric intensity and the story holds such staggering eroticism without becoming erotica, that I became enthralled. It is an intense study of two very different people, and the author skillfully takes the reader deeper and deeper into each character, until you feel you know them inside and out, because they share so many genuine human emotions as the reader.

Greenwell has created an indelible story, a masterpiece that will stand long after other contemporary works are forgotten.

Finished a Week of Expunging

At least once per year, usually around New Years, Herman and I do a house purging. This year it came early, because after the wretched news of another mass shooting, we needed a mental tonic.

We started by cleaning out our garage and shed, donating or throwing away everything we no longer need or use. Those two areas produced two truckloads of stuff. Then we focused on the inside of the house, the closets, which produced another truckload of donatables.

I don’t know why, but purging always brings me joy. I’ve never been a packrat, and the fewer possessions I have around me, the more liberated I feel. Possessions weigh me down, shackle me. They take energy, pull my attention to them, clutter my mind.

One of my happiest times in the last several years came when Herman and I first moved into our Palm Springs house. During the first two weeks—before the moving van arrived with all our belongings—we lived in an empty house. Only an air mattress and sleeping bags in the bedroom, a card table and chairs in the dining room, and our laptops. No pictures on the walls, no TV, no writing desks, nada. I felt so free. With nothing but white walls, I felt I could remake myself into anything I wanted. I could be someone new each day. Then the furniture and artwork arrived, and with it came all my personal history. And I was back to being that person again, anchor into that mindset by all those things.

I believe it’s true, that the things we gather around us do define who/what we are. It’s why people hoard. The more things you gather, the more tightly expressed you become. All those things are a visual manifestation of who we are, they define us, and that gives most people a great deal of comfort. Not me; I like existing with as few boundaries/definitions as possible.